It only took me two five months of on and off work to make this happen, but welcome, to the new ghostfreeman.net! I decided at the end of 2009 that a change was in order — where I only had about a week of time and effort to make a portfolio site, my long term goals were to always port the site over to WordPress. With the amount of time my schedule affords, I decided to jump on that opportunity in the past week and we’ve arrived here.

Once again, like with the previous site (and its incarnations), its substance over style. Good UX and content makes the backbone of this site with some pretty to keep people around longer. Also, as you’ll notice, the blog is now the centerpiece of the site. This decision was made based on what Google Analytics told me about the last site — that the blog was the most visited page on the whole site. So, why try harder making you view content you didn’t want to see?

The new design also reflects the change in direction I mentioned last month a while ago — i’m going to be writing more so now it has to become the centerpiece. This isn’t to say that the pages you would expect to see are missing, they’re still around. There’s a new portfolio, about page, and a place to answer any burning questions you might have.

I’ll be making minor changes on and off over the remainder of the week as I add in modules that are missing (like a portfolio section, which will go up in about an hour). Hopefully it’ll be finished by the end of the week.

If you have any remarks, please feel free to leave a comment or contact me directly.

At DevChatt, Medium announced the greatest thing since LAMP — MessageDB, a versioned datastore for non-relational content. Today, I document how to install MessageDB on Ubuntu Linux 9.10.

The more people we have running Message, the faster we can begin using it in web applications. If you don’t know what Message is or how it could change your life, then you should probably read up on it.

Well, it’s finally happening. Chattanooga’s first developer conference, DevChatt, is set to begin today at 5pm, and it’s arguably shaping up to be the most exciting thing to happen in town since we had the NCAA Division I championship. But before I go amping my presentation (or the ones I’m psyched about), I need to address some otherwise stupid things I did earlier this week.

There’s an old saying around these parts, that the “Internet” is “Serious Business.” In reality, when someone makes this remark, someone is clearly taking things they say or read on the Internet in a non-joking manner when in reality, some things should be lighthearted or we should be expected to understand other’s point of view and not go “Dear Internet” when someone makes an opposing viewpoint. I chose, instead of accepting opposing points of view on healthcare reform, to silence them altogether by blocking people on Twitter. This decision was beyond unprofessional, and I was ashamed to even use the site given that on Sunday it turned into a cesspool of hatred on both sides of the fence. So, I ran away from the situation, leaving all the social networking sites I frequent in a hurry and I spent the rest of the week in a dark closet. I’m not expecting anyone to forgive me for my behavior, and if this affects the way people perceive me in real life or the Internet, well, that’s just something i’ll haveta live with. I can only say that the way I acted was childish, stupid, and I should have been less “serious” throughout all the “serious business.”

Ok, that said, let’s get back to DevChatt. I’ll be speaking on HTML5 tonight at 8pm, and as soon as that concludes, expect to see all the notes, slides, and source code in its glory right here. It’s going to be a very loaded event, and I have a few speeches I’d like to see (or at least get the slides from).

Mike Harrison’s speech on Visualizing and managing data sets. Simply being in the same room with Mike makes me smarter, and every time we’ve discussed data sets, it’s made me a better programmer.

Ben Weaver’s speech on XMPP in real-time applications.

Donald Sayers’ speech on“The Internet and You.” This might be just up my alley.

Aaron Gustasfon’s speech on ARIA. I’m still kicking myself over missing his speech on Progressive Enhancement at BarCamp Chattanooga, and I won’t miss an opportunity to get caught up on making modern web apps accessible from the master himself.

Travis Dunn’s speech on Frank. I’ve been playing with Frank in my Rails stuff, and its pretty krad.

Medium’s speech. Hopefully this will be the official release of Message i’ve been waiting on for a year.

It’s going to be fun held by all. I can’t wait to see all the pretty faces there tonight and tomorrow.

It appears that Google is pushing out either a new search results design to everyone, or pushing it out to a few for testing purposes. I don’t know what to make of this, but I will say this much — it looks VERY nice, and its a drastic UX improvement over the way real time search results have shown up.